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Personal Note Archive October 2011

1st October 2011

Rugby School, one of the British public schols where the games now known as rugby and football were originally played. Rugby was later to become a significant factor in the cultural history of Wales. See below... (Image is copyright free)

The Welsh rugby team is doing well at the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. Wales and rugby go together, and rarely has a game reflected the history of a country so clearly. In the late nineteenth century the native population of Wales was unable to meet demand for workers in the south Wales coal fields. This led to high wages in the mines as mine owners tried to attract workers. Massive immigration into Wales followed. Between 1871 and 1911 the population of Wales increased by one million. This was a young, tough industrial population used to working in teams. Rugby flourished, with many clubs based around pubs. Wales was booming economically, and was also seeking a clear national identity within Britain. This cause was served by rugby. By the turn of the century the Welsh team was a major force. A great Welsh national moment came in 1905 during a tour of Britain by the New Zealand All Blacks team. The All Blacks had destroyed all opposition in England, Scotland and Ireland, amassing eight hundred points to twenty seven for the combined opposition. Then on 16th December 1905 the All Blacks came up against Wales at Cardiff Arms Park. The match was a closely fought battle, won with a single Welsh try, scored by Dr Edward Morgan. This was a significant event in the cultural history of Wales, and Edward Morgan is commemorated by that great medal for figures deemed historical, a blue plaque, placed near his birthplace in Agents Row, Abernant. In this sense the history of rugby is not confined to quirky interest in sport. 16th December 1905 is a date in Welsh as well as rugby history.

 

 

7th October 2011

The Bank Of England - Could trying to forsee the financial future have something to do with creating a financial crisis worse than anything in the past?

In his History of Economics J.K. Galbraith points out that the world's stock markets rely on people not being able to tell where they are going. If someone worked out a guaranteed way to predict market trends, people would soon cotton on to this magic discovery, and all money would follow the guru's predictions. Then with all money heading in the same direction, the market would collapse. According to the writer Robert Harris, this bizarre scenario might actually have come partially true. In his new book on the stock market called The Fear Index he describes frustrated physicists, thrown out of a job when the U.S. government cancelled a huge particle accelerator project. They then went off to Wall Street and spent their days devising computer programs to predict market trends. Prior to 2008 these computer programs revealed that the U.S. housing market had never fallen in history. So computer controlled trading all around the world piled money into the American mortgage market, which prompty collapsed. This just goes to show you can't write history before it has happened. Even after it has happened, people argue about it endlessly. It seems the only thing you can rely on is unpredictability.

 

 

14th October 2011

The Royal Albert Hall, as the audience arrives for the 25th anniversary performance of Phantom of the Opera. You could say the Phantom of the Opera was kept firmly under lock and key until the sixteenth century, when he escaped in spectacular fashion during a spectacular blossoming of theatre.

Last weekend we were lucky enough to go to the 25th anniversary performance of Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall. I was sitting next to an American lady in full Phantom regalia who pretended to play the organ with much passion during dramatic moments. It was a great performance of what I think is Andrew Lloyd Webber's best show. There's a real feeling for the darkly magical unpredictability of drama and illusion. It was this unpredictability perhaps that led to theatre being outlawed by the medieval church. In medieval England drama only existed as repetitive church ritual. But it seems the Phantom could not be contained. In a very piecemeal fashion plays began to develop out of sung portions, known as tropes, of early Christian festivals. The trope for Easter "Quen quaeritis" consisted of a short dialogue, together with some rudimentary stage directions. Onto this little piece of drama other speeches were added, and slowly a new drama evolved. Soon the action became too big for a church building, and it moved outside. Of course it was also probable that the new drama was becoming too unpredictable, leaving behind the certainties of ritual. This meant that in many cases the new drama was forcibly ejected from church buildings. Unpredictability was allowed in, and in the later sixteenth century theatre suddenly flowered into a great art form. The Phantom emerged from his lair.

 

19th October 2011

The traditional site of the Battle of Hastings at Battle. A new book claims the battle happened elsewhere. How much do such claims matter?

A book published recently by historian Nick Austin claims that the traditional site of the Battle of Hastings, at Battle near Hastings, is not actually the correct site. He locates it at Crowhurst a few miles to the south of Battle. So where does that leave Battle, and the visitors centre and all of that stuff?

There are two points to make. First history writing is just like any other kind of writing. It has to compete for attention, and there is little mileage in saying what people have said in the past. Demolishing accepted ideas makes a splash and gets publicity. It is not often that history books make the main BBC news page, but that's what happened with Nick Austin's book. So there is an in built tendency for history to change over time, because that's what gets attention in history.

The second point involves historical sites in general. People visit places where history happened, but the fact is those places never stay the same for long. This is true even of sites associated with recent history. People have sent me e-mail about "misleading" visitors to the famous Abbey Road zebra crossing, where the Beatles were pictured on the cover of the Abbey Road album. Over the decades that crossing has moved a few meters, which in some people's view means that the present Abbey Road crossing is not the original crossing. But the original crossing would have been long gone anyway. The paint would have been rubbed off by passing traffic, the belisha beacons would have been maintained, and their parts replaced. There is no way that any crossing of Abbey Road in 2011 would be the same one that existed in 1969, unless of course you immediately closed Abbey Road and placed a building over it with a carefully controlled atmosphere, and never let anyone walk over it. But if you did that the Abbey Road crossing would still cease to exist as a road crossing used by people in north London. So if you have those difficulties with sites dating from times as recent as the late 1960s, how are we going to fare with sites where events took place nearly 1000 years ago? In a sense no site in southern England is now the place where the Battle of Hastings took place. That place vanished long ago. But William the Conqueror decided to build an abbey at the top of a ridge at Battle, and he probably did this because something major happened close to it. The fields in front of the abbey are not the fields of 1066, just as fields at Crowhurst are not the fields of 1066. You cannot stop history, and freeze a part of it. Life goes on, and if it didn't there would be no history. The Abbey Road crossing might not be the one the Beatles walked across in 1969, but because that crossing exists in the real changing world, we can still walk over it.

 

26th October 2011

Vital meetings take place in Brussels this week as politicians try to work out what to do about the debt crisis. But what are these meetings actually like?

There's a very important meeting this week in Brussels as representatives of European governments try to work out what to do about the debt crisis. So far progress seems to have been slow in coming. I've been reading Alan Clark's diaries recently. As Minister for Trade in the mid 1980s Clark attended many economic meetings in Europe, and his recollections of them are not encouraging. The following from Monday 5th October 1987 is typical:

"A totally wasted day at the Council of Ministers. No conclusions, no nothing. I can't remember what we were discussing although the meeting only broke up an hour ago and the Line To Take from the Foreign Office was 'prepared for any eventuality' and some six pages long. The background brief weighed about four kilos."

A combination of impenetrable official paperwork and lack of practical outcome. Let's hope this picture isn't the one that plays out in the meetings in Europe taking place at the moment.

 

 

 

29th October 2011

Shelley's Cottage in West Street, Marlow - Mary Shelley finished her novel Frankenstein here. What would Mary have thought of the Large Hadron Collidor, cloning and genetically modified plants?

2011 has had a number of news stories related to science and what it might do to the world. The risk of the Large Hadron Collidor creating a black hole, and the possible detection of particles travelling faster than light, were significant stories gaining much coverage. When people worry about science, they often mention a nineteenth century gothic horror story by Mary Shelley called Frankenstein. This has been taken as a cautionary tale about science and scientists over reaching themselves. And certainly in the story of a scientist taking dead body parts and reanimating them, a sense of fear about what science might do is clear. That message seems as resonant now as when Frankenstein was first written in 1816. I read Frankenstein recently, most of it on a train to Wales. I was struck by how Frankenstein's Creature, horribly unfamiliar though he appears, is initially benevolent. He tries to help the people he meets. This is before fear of his appearance turns the Creature into an outcast. Frankenstein's own rejection of his creation is too much for the lonely Creature to bear, and he becomes embittered and murderous. But it is people's fear that makes the Creature like this. If they had been more accepting, understanding and open minded then the helpful potential of the Creature might have been realised - he is after all immensely strong physically and highly intelligent. So when people talk of Frankenstein science they are talking about more than they realise. They are talking about science, and also the way people typically look at science.